While
the rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination battle it out in a
succession of grueling primary elections and caucuses, Vice President Dick
Cheney appears to be fighting to secure his spot on the Republican ticket
behind President George W. Bush.

The vice president, whose
moderation and 35-year Washington experience reassured voters worried about
the callowness and inexperience of Bush during the 2000 campaign, is seen
more and more by Republican politicos as a drag on the president's
re-election chances in what is universally expected to be an extremely close
race.

The reasons are simple:
instead of the moderate voice of wisdom and caution that voters thought they
were getting in the vice president, ongoing disclosures about his role in
the drive to war in Iraq and other controversial administration initiatives
depict him as an extremist who constantly pushed for the most radical
measures.

Not just an extremist, but
also a kind of eminence grise who exercises undue influence over Bush
to further a radical agenda, a notion that was furthered by the publication
of a recent book about former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill who described
Cheney as creating a “kind of praetorian guard around the president” that
blocked out contrary views.

In addition, Cheney's
association with Halliburton, the giant construction and oil company that he
headed for much of the 1990s and that gobbled up billions of dollars in
contracts for Iraq's post-war reconstruction, is growing steadily as a major
political liability.

Indeed, Democrats in
Congress and on the campaign trail are already using Halliburton's rhythmic,
four-syllable name (Hal'-li-bur-ton, Hal'-li-bur-ton) as a mantra that
neatly taps into the public's growing concerns on Iraq and disgust with
crony capitalism and corporate greed all at the same time.

“Dump
Cheney” Movement

Reports surfaced already two months ago that a discreet “dump-Cheney”
movement had been launched by intimate associates of Bush's father--his
national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, and secretary of state, James
Baker, who now has a White House appointment as Bush's personal envoy to
persuade official creditors to substantially reduce Iraq 's $110 billion
foreign debt.

In addition to their
perception that Cheney's presence would harm Bush's re-election chances, the
two men, who battled frequently with the vice president when he was defense
secretary under the first Bush administration, have privately expressed
great concern over the Cheney's unparalleled influence over the younger Bush
and the damage it has done to U.S. relations with long-time allies,
particularly in Europe and the Arab world.

Cheney's unprecedented
rounds of press interviews earlier this month, as well as his trip this week
to Switzerland and Italy--only the second time the vice president has
traveled abroad in three years--should be seen in this context.

“I think he knows that he's
in trouble,” noted one prominent Republican activist, who thinks Cheney
should be dropped. “I don't think there's any other way to explain why he
would sit for a puerile interview for the (Washington Post's) “Style”
section. You know he despises that sort of thing.”

Cheney's travel and sudden
and abundant press availability was noted in the New York Times on
Jan. 27, which described his behavior as “a calculated election-year
makeover to temper his hard-line image at home and abroad.”

What was remarkable,
however, is that he may only have confirmed the growing impression that he
remains a zealot, an impression that was especially pronounced in an
interview he gave National Public Radio (NPR) last week.

Cheney not only insisted
that the major stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) may still be
found in Iraq, he also asserted that two semi-trailer trucks found in Iraq
during the war constituted “conclusive evidence” of WMD programs.

Both assertions were almost
instantly refuted by none other than the administration's outgoing chief
weapons inspector, David Kay. In a series of statements published after
Cheney's NPR broadcast, Kay said he had concluded that the WMD stockpiles
were destroyed in the early 1990s and that the two trailers were intended to
introduce hydrogen for weather balloons or possibly rocket fuel, but had
nothing to do with WMD.

In the same NPR interview,
Cheney also insisted there was “overwhelming evidence” of an “established
relationship” between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda, citing as one clue
Hussein's alleged harboring of a suspect in the 1993 bombing of the World
Trade Center in New York .

But the notion of such an
“established relationship” in any operational sense has now been virtually
totally discarded by the intelligence community, and Bush and other senior
officials have largely dropped the issue.

Moreover, the FBI and other
intelligence agencies that investigated the 1993 bombing and the subsequent
residence in Iraq of Abdul Rahman Yasin, a low-level suspect, never found
any evidence that Iraq was actively protecting him or that he was linked to
Iraqi intelligence in any way.

Indeed, the fact that
Cheney would cite Yasin at this late date suggested that he still clings to
a theory developed in the 1990s by Iraq specialist Laurie Mylroie at the
neoconservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI) that al Qaeda was
actually a front for Iraqi intelligence, a notion that is completely
dismissed by the intelligence community.

In a recent Washington
Monthly article based on interviews with numerous intelligence officials
involved in the bombing investigation, Peter Bergen, author of
Holy War, Inc., a highly regarded book on al Qaeda, concluded that
Mylroie was, “in short, a crackpot.”

Cheney as
Richelieu

In a
second interview, Cheney told USA Today that he was not worried about
his image as the administration's Machiavelli skilled in the quiet arts of
persuading his “Prince” to pursue questionable policies, adding,
surprisingly unselfconsciously, “Am I the evil genius in the corner that
nobody ever sees come out of his hole? It's a nice way to operate,
actually.”

But whether Cheney likes it
or not, he is increasingly seen that way, by Democrats, by Republican
internationalists like Baker and Scowcroft, and, perhaps, most significantly
for purposes of Bush's re-election prospects, by a growing number of
traditionally Republican right-wingers and libertarians who are worried
about the exploding costs of the “war on terror” on the country's fiscal
health, individual liberties, and armed forces. They also blame Cheney for
being administration's key backer and enabler of the neoconservative vision
of a never-ending war against radical Islam, which they believe will only
accelerate current trends.

“So Dick Cheney turns out
to be a true radical--not a moderate Republican,” noted Georgie Anne Geyer,
a nationally syndicated columnist, who compared the vice president to
Cardinal Richelieu of 17th century France in a cover article for this week's
edition of American Conservative.

“While there is little
mystery about what he has actually done, there remains the mystery of how a
man from Wyoming should be the epicenter of a scheme so strange, so
Machiavellian, so profoundly disaggregated from the American context,” she
wrote. “But no one should expect Dick Cheney and his group (of
neoconservatives) to change. They will not.”

In a case of particularly
bad timing, Cheney's image as a manipulative schemer was furthered again
this week just as he was trying to reassure Europeans about his moderation
and commitment to multilateralism.

In a new book on Tony
Blair, author and Financial Times correspondent Philip Stephens
depicts Cheney as the surprise guest at key meetings between Bush and the
British prime minister. It quotes one Blair aide as complaining that Cheney
“waged a guerrilla war” against London's efforts to seek UN approval before
the war.

The book concludes that
Cheney constantly “sought to undermine the prime minister privately” and
quotes him as telling another senior official more than six months before
the war, “Once we have victory in Baghdad, all the critics will look like
fools.”

Despite Hussein's capture,
however, that “victory” still looks rather tenuous, and, what with recent
polls showing Cheney's favorability rating at less than half of Bush's at a
mere 20% and falling, so may Cheney's claim to the number two spot on the
Republican ticket.